The Great Lehnsherr
by Magentoff
Summary: Half-canon and half-AU, this is the love story of Charles and Erik rewritten with a Great Gatsby spin. In which Erik is essentially Jay Gatsby and Charles is Daisy, and the plot follows a mix of The Great Gatsby and the XMFC/DoFp movies (and a bit of the comics). "old friend" is "old sport" in this fanfic ;)


Erik couldn't help but love him. The first time they met, Erik had been drowning, unable to let go of his desperate quest for revenge. Then an angel had suddenly reached pale hands out towards him and pulled him up out of the water, gasping for air. He had turned around angrily, only to find a man with wide blue eyes staring at him balefully. An angel, whose face shone under the moonlight and whose skin glistened with water drops that fell like diamonds. Erik's much-needed breath caught in his throat, and he felt like he was drowning again.

The angel's name was Charles.

Charles was born into wealth. Surrounded by the rich and the "good guys," Charles shouldn't have met Erik, who was the exact opposite. But through some stroke of chance, they met, Charles uttered the words "You're not alone," and Erik couldn't turn away, couldn't scream that he was a beast consumed by rage, a murderer, an orphan of concentration camps.

But Charles acted like he knew already and didn't care. Erik didn't know for sure if Charles really knew everything about him, but Charles did have the power of telepathy. When he spoke in your mind his voice was like rough silk, husky and with so many inflections it made even the most steel-hearted of men weak. When he spoke out loud, his warm voice was made even more tantalizing by his sinfully red lips. It was heaven.

Erik, who had built up his life so carefully to this point for the sole purpose of revenge, found himself putting aside his dreams for the moment. How could he not? The red lips pouted, smiled, laughed, and grimaced. The blue eyes flashed with joy, sadness, hope, anger, and… love? For Erik? Erik wasn't sure, but he stayed and played house with Charles and their mutant teen "children." The two of them spent their days in Charles's luxurious mansion playing chess, talking into the night, training (and weeping), and looking at each other with so much intensity that one day, Raven couldn't help but cry out:

"Charles, Erik looks at you the way every woman wants to be looked at."

"But I'm not a woman," Charles had replied, his puzzlement half-feigned and half-genuine. "I'm really not." And his bright blue eyes were wet with tears.

Raven kneeled down before her brother.

"If Erik were straight," Raven spoke slowly. "He wouldn't look at you like he's in love. He wouldn't have even stayed, you know. He has no reason to."

She stood back up suddenly, sharply. "Besides, it's a good thing you're not a woman, because the only way for a woman to survive in this world is if she's a fool. A beautiful, beautiful fool."

She turned from her blonde form to her true, blue one and stared intently at Charles. "I'm neither, but Erik accepts me for who I am. If you don't make your move soon, Charles, then I will."

After she left, Charles sat outside on the porch in stunned silence for a long while. Minutes, hours, ticked by before a sharp figure in a black turtleneck appeared. Erik looked at Charles in concern.

"Are you alright, old friend?"

Charles wiped at his tears and tilted his face up towards Erik, who saw the glistening, wet skin shining under the moonlight and was reminded of that fateful first encounter.

"Quite alright." Charles's voice was made even huskier and richer from crying, and his beautiful lips trembled. There was no doubt now that there was love in those baby blue eyes, but Erik couldn't kiss him yet, for he knew that once they kissed he would no longer be the same, that he wouldn't be able to live as he did before, freely searching for Shaw. Once they kissed, he would be forever wed to Charles. And so Erik waited a moment, gazing up at the starlit skies above before at last leaning down towards a waiting red mouth.

With that kiss, Charles bloomed for him like a rose, and the incarnation was complete. They spent each night together after that, until the war came and separated them with a force and suddenness as great as the one that had brought them together.

In Cuba, cradling an injured Charles in his arms, Erik was exposed for what he was — a monster unworthy of an angel. Still, he pleaded to no avail, knowing that Charles, precious Charles, would have to refuse him. Erik left alone to wage a war on humanity, and Charles stayed behind in his mansion, waiting for the day Erik would return.

He never did.

For some reason or another, Erik could not return after the war, and Charles got restless. He had been trying to turn his mansion into a school for mutants but had been searching for students himself through Cerebro, picking and choosing who he wanted. The school remained small, intimate, run by Charles with the help of Hank.

Then Logan, a student Charles helped immensely, swept Charles and the school up in a whirlwind. He was confident, strong, practically immortal, and not afraid to voice his opinions. He convinced Charles to open up his school to the public, to expand it so greatly that Charles knew it would become his entire heart. Logan's plans sounded so extravagant and so wonderful that Charles couldn't help but say yes.

On the day before Charles plan to announce his school's existence to the world, he received a letter. Raven, who had refused to go with Erik and stayed with her brother, rushed up to Charles's room to see what had happened, and found him choking with sobs on the ground. There were half empty bottles of alcohol strewn about, and Charles was inconsolable.

"Tell them Charles changed his mind! Charles changed his mind!" He flung the shiny new sign that read "Xavier's Institute for Higher Learning" at Raven blindly, still clutching the letter tightly.

Raven called Logan up, and together, they tried to talk sense into Charles. When that didn't work, Logan picked Charles up and dumped him into a bathtub of cold water. Raven tried to pry the letter out of Charles's clenched fist, but he wouldn't let go until it dissolved into pieces in the water. Raven and Logan never found out what it said.

The next day, Charles put the sign up and followed his and Logan's plan to a T without breaking a sweat. Students and teachers alike streamed in, and Charles's school flourished.

Erik was seemingly forgotten as the school took up all of Charles's time and energy.


End file.
